Is Loyverse NF525-Compliant in France? 2026 Review

You probably installed Loyverse for good reasons. The app is free, the interface is clean, and you can learn it in an evening. Built by a company based in Hong Kong, available in more than 30 languages and used by hundreds of thousands of merchants worldwide, Loyverse is a serious POS. Nothing in this article says otherwise.

The problem sits somewhere else, and it is purely French. Since 2018, every VAT-registered merchant in France must ring up sales on software that meets four legal requirements: inalterability, security, conservation and archiving of sales data. This is the NF525 framework, also known as ISCA. The rule was born from a practice tax officials knew all too well: cash register software that let a merchant erase part of the day’s sales before the VAT return. The lawmaker’s answer was to require tills that keep everything, all the time.

There are two ways to prove compliance. Either an official NF525 certification issued by an accredited body (LNE, or Infocert on behalf of AFNOR), or an editor self-certification attestation, a route explicitly allowed by French law since August 2024. From 1 September 2026, software editors must provide one or the other.

This is where things get complicated for French Loyverse users. As of this article’s last update, Loyverse does not appear on the public list of NF525-certified POS software, and does not provide an editor attestation written for the French legal framework. That is hardly surprising: Loyverse serves a global market, and France is one country among dozens. A Hong Kong company has no obligation to study the French tax code. You, however, do have the obligation to comply with it. And during a tax audit, the person answering for the till is you, not the software vendor.

Don’t take our word for it: the registers of certified software are public and searchable online in a few minutes. If Loyverse’s situation changes one day, good news for its French users. Until then, you have to decide based on the facts as they stand today.

The fine is written into law, not into a sales brochure. Article 1770 duodecies of the French Tax Code provides for a 7,500€ fine per non-compliant POS system, with 60 days to get compliant. If you run two tills, the count is per till. And if the breach continues past the deadline, the fine can be applied again.

The obligation covers every VAT-registered business that records customer payments with cash register software: the food truck as much as the brasserie, the beauty salon as much as the corner shop. Company size exempts you from nothing.

The number stings, but it is not the worst part of the scenario. A non-compliant till is a signal to the inspector: if the software cannot guarantee that sales are inalterable, why trust the figures it produces? Tax authorities can then dig deeper, go back over several fiscal years and question the credibility of your entire accounting. For most shops, a VAT reassessment covering several years costs far more than the fine itself.

Picture the scene. An inspector walks into your shop and asks for the document proving your till is compliant: an NF525 certificate or an editor attestation. With Loyverse, you have nothing to hand over that French tax authorities officially recognize. You also have no native FEC export, the standardized Fichier des Écritures Comptables the administration expects during an audit. You can show your CSV exports and your good faith. Good faith does not replace the document the law requires.

Let’s say it again, to be fair to the vendor: this is not about software quality. Loyverse works very well at what it does, and thousands of merchants outside France use it without the slightest legal issue. It is about a French legal framework the product was never adapted to. An excellent tool in the wrong country is still a problem.

ISCA covers four precise obligations. Let’s take them one by one, and see where Loyverse stands.

Inalterability. A validated sale must be impossible to modify or delete. This is the heart of the anti-fraud rules: no sale gets erased after the fact. In practice, a compliant till never deletes anything: if the waiter made a mistake, it records a cancellation that leaves a trace, and both operations stay visible in the history. Loyverse allows adjustments and deletions in certain scenarios, which does not fit the strict French requirement. For an international product this is an understandable choice, since most markets require nothing of the sort. For the French tax administration, it is disqualifying.

Security. Transactions must be cryptographically chained: each record is tied to the previous one, so any tampering can be detected. Loyverse does not implement the specific chaining NF525 expects.

Conservation. Sales data must be kept for at least 6 years, under conditions guaranteed in France. Loyverse stores your data in its cloud, which is convenient day to day, but without contractual guarantees aligned with this French obligation. If a dispute arises, you have no clause to point to.

Archiving. Exports must be in a format readable by tax authorities, typically the standardized FEC. Loyverse offers CSV exports, useful for your own tracking, but not a native French FEC.

None of these four limits is a design flaw. Each pillar was written to fight VAT fraud in France, and only in France. International POS products like Loyverse build for other markets and other rulebooks: HMRC in the UK, GS1 in Germany, and so on. No vendor can cover every tax code on the planet. The outcome for you does not change, though: on these four criteria, the till French law demands and the till Loyverse provides are not the same product.

The good news: you do not have to choose between compliance and your budget. Several free or freemium POS systems are NF525-compliant and built for the French market.

digabloPos is a free alternative to Loyverse, designed for the French and international market. The core software is free forever: checkout, receipts, catalog, with no sales limit. The NF525 self-certified attestation, legally equivalent to LNE certification since the August 2024 law, downloads directly from your account: the document the inspector asks for is two clicks away. The software works fully offline (sales keep going when the connection drops), speaks 6 languages including French, handles the CFA franc for Francophone Africa, and provides the native FEC export your accountant expects. If you are coming from Loyverse, the logic feels familiar: mobile app, free plan, quick to learn.

SumUp POS (formerly Tiller) is NF525-certified, but the pricing model deserves a calculation: 1.75% charged on every card transaction, or a 25€/month subscription to lower that commission. For a shop with heavy card volume, the yearly bill climbs fast.

L’Addition is a French restaurant specialist, NF525-compliant, starting at 49€/month. Solid for an established restaurant with table service, oversized for a small shop.

Lightspeed is NF525-compliant but starts at 79€/month and relies heavily on the cloud. It is built for multi-location operations, not as the natural replacement for a free plan.

Whichever product you pick, check three things before committing: does the compliance document download immediately, is the FEC export native, and does the till keep selling without a connection? These three questions weed out the fragile candidates fast.

Our honest read: if you were on Loyverse, it is because free suited you. Moving to a 49€ or 79€ monthly subscription just to be legal means paying top price for compliance. A free, compliant alternative exists; start there, and only move upmarket if your business genuinely calls for it. Either way, if you are ringing up sales in France with Loyverse today, migrating to a compliant system is the only sustainable option. The sooner you migrate, the smoother the transition before 1 September 2026.

What holds most merchants back is not switching software, it is the fear of losing data: the catalog built product by product, the prices, the customers, the history. On that point, relax: Loyverse does not hold your data hostage. It lets you export your product catalog, your customers and your sales history in standard CSV format.

digabloPos offers a guided migration module that imports those exports automatically. Catalog, prices, categories, customers, history: everything comes across in a few hours, without closing your shop for a single day. In practice, you export your files after the evening shift, the import runs, and you ring up sales on the new till the next morning. For the first few days, keep Loyverse installed for reference: your past data stays available there as an archive while you check that everything came through. Your new activity, meanwhile, starts NF525-compliant from the very first receipt.

Two precautions are worth the effort. First, switch on a quiet day, not a busy Saturday: the first shift on a new till takes some attention, even when the interface feels familiar. Second, train the team before the big day, even just half an hour: the basic moves are quick to learn, and better learned without a customer waiting at the counter.

Then there is the calendar. Every software vendor knows about the 1 September 2026 deadline, and the three months before it will likely be busy everywhere: saturated support, longer onboarding queues. Migrating in spring or early summer means migrating calmly. Waiting until August means queueing with everyone else who waited until August.

Let’s put numbers on both sides of the scale.

On the compliance side, the spend can be zero. Your current hardware stays: Loyverse runs on a tablet or a phone, and an alternative like digabloPos runs on the same device. Your receipt printer, cash drawer and barcode scanner reconnect. The software itself is free in its core version, and the compliance attestation costs nothing extra. What remains is time: a few hours for the export, the import and the checks, half a day counting team training. If you prefer a paid option, add the subscription: from 25€/month with SumUp POS to 79€/month with Lightspeed, depending on the tier.

On the waiting side, the potential bill reads differently. A 7,500€ fine per non-compliant till, a 60-day deadline to redo everything under pressure, and the door open to a deeper examination of your accounting. Not to mention the most common and most expensive scenario: migrating anyway, but in a panic, in August 2026, with the vendor’s support team overwhelmed and your staff trained in a rush between two shifts.

On one side, zero euros and half a day. On the other, a four-figure risk and weeks of stress. Business decisions are rarely this lopsided.

You do not need a six-month plan. Here is a schedule that fits in one week, an hour a day.

Day 1: check your situation. Open the public registers of certified software and look up your current till. If you are on Loyverse you already know the answer, but the exercise is worth doing for any product.

Day 2: export your data from Loyverse. Catalog, customers, sales history, all in CSV. Even if you are not migrating right away, keeping a copy of your own data is basic hygiene.

Day 3: create an account on a compliant alternative and import your catalog. With the digabloPos migration module, most of it happens automatically. Run a few test sales, print a receipt, check that your prices and categories came through.

Day 4: download the compliance attestation and file it with your accounting documents. This is the paper that changes everything during an audit; it should be reachable in one minute, not buried in an inbox.

Day 5: show the new till to your team and set the switch date, ideally a quiet day.

One week later, you are selling legally, on the same hardware, without spending a euro more than before. And the 1 September 2026 deadline becomes what it should always have been for you: a date that concerns other people.